MOVIE REVIEW : Frears’ ‘Sammy and Rosie’ Gets Frayed

After the freshness and subtlety of “My Beautiful Laundrette”--the assured manner in which Hanif Kureishi’s screenplay folded together the subjects of race, sex, age, class and money in present-day London and the deft generosity with which Stephen Frears directed it--it is no fun to report that, by whatever name, “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid” (advertised decorously in The Times and elsewhere as “Sammy and Rosie”) is stunningly, ponderously bad. (It is at the Beverly Center Cineplex.)

Kureishi seems not to have expanded upon his original subjects, although this time all subtlety has fled; it leaves him scrubbing back and forth over the same material until he has worn a hole in it. And surprisingly enough, Frears is either disinclined or unable to work the material into a better form.

Briefly, the film tracks three unloving couples--married, related or intertwined with each other--against the blazing background of street riots in Mrs. Thatcher’s London, which seems almost indistinguishable from Beirut. No hint is given that this is not meant to be the present, yet it seems to be the period of the riots following the Cherry Groce shooting in Brixton, South London in 1985.

The title couple live with self-conscious pride in the inner city, which is in flames for most of the movie. “Leonardo Da Vinci would have lived in the inner city,” one says, “it’s a mass of fascination.” Sammy (Ayub Kan Din), is a lugubrious young accountant; Rosie (Frances Barber), his wife, is a political activist and social worker. Arriving to stir the plot is Sammy’s prodigiously rich Pakistani papa, Rafi Rahman (the great Shashi Kapoor), who abandoned his British-born son five years earlier to “get rich and powerful”--and perhaps have a hand in a little torture and suppression--back in his homeland.

But he is back in England now for good, to wade into his son’s private life, to assure himself of grandchildren, to settle a disquietingly large sum of money on Sammy, and, perhaps, to pick things up with a now-widowed Alice (Clare Bloom) where he left them some 30 years ago. Grandchildren do not seem to be in the offing, at least not from the pairing of Sammy and Rosie. Sammy spends most of his time making what passes for love to Anna (Wendy Gazelle), an American photographer there to photograph “decaying Europe.” (The film is Time-rated Mature for sex and nudity.) Whatever her husband does sexually is of almost complete indifference to Rosie, whose head is shortly turned by Danny (“call me Victoria”), a staggeringly handsome cafe au lait pan-sexual who is given more presence than the silly role deserves by Roland Gift, one of the members of the Fine Young Cannibals pop group.

Danny/Victoria seems to have stepped straight out of the Sixties, living in a trailer whose exterior is covered with lines from The Waste Land, master of cool, master of omnipotence and, of course, instantly drawn to Rosie. His dilemma, in the face of the most recent in a series of racial shootings, is whether to take the path of violence or nonviolence.

Sammy’s dilemma is a stickier one. Two of Rosie’s lesbian friends, Vivia and Rani (mentioned that way only because Kureishi has written--and Frears has directed--them to be The Lesbians, utterly unreal symbols), have dug up damning evidence of Rafi’s complicity in torture. And Kureishi has outfitted Rafi with Ghost, a spectral torture victim (Badi Uzzaman) who turns up everywhere, driving cabs and walking through walls. What should Sammy do--take the money, the car, the house and his father (and the torture victim) as permanent guests, or develop a little backbone? Unfortunately, he is never given a chance to work that out.

In the crisscrossing romances of couples with a surfeit of “boredom, indifference, repulsion” to each other, Kureishi has his characters talk unceasingly but say little that doesn’t seem to have come from some 1960s time capsule. “Rosie says these revolts are an affirmation of the human spirit,” her husband quotes with a straight face. Anna is busy with the pressure points of her feet. “A man who hasn’t killed is a virgin,” Rafi announces, while poor Claire Bloom, when she isn’t making soap box preachments, has to ask, delicately, “Would you like some more Earl Grey tea?”

An air of the most relentless theatricality hangs over the film. Finally, at the great, poetic protest, as the evil land grabbers are sweeping up all the squatters’ caravans, one of The Lesbians spray-paints a green V on the back of a watching woman’s fur coat. Only it’s fake-fur. Seems just about right.

‘SAMMY AND ROSIE GET LAID’ A Cinecom Entertainment Group release. Producers Tim Bevan, Sarah Radclyffe. Director Stephan Frears. Screenplay Hanif Kureishi. Lighting cameraman Oliver Stapleton. Sound mixer Albert Bailey. Production designer Hugo Luczyc Wyhowski. Editor Mick Audskey. Costumes Barbara Kidd. With Shashi Kapoor, Frances Barber, Claire Bloom, Ayub Khan Din, Roland Gift, Wendy Gazelle.

Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes.

Times rating: Mature, for sex and nudity.